The night bakery

At two in the morning, the bakery door was the only lit doorway in the street. Finn stood outside it with his bicycle helmet under his arm. His first shift began at quarter past, but the owner had told him to arrive early enough to change. Through the glass he could see a woman rolling a metal rack towards an oven. Nobody appeared to notice him. He tried the handle, found it unlocked and stepped inside. The door closed softly behind him, cutting off the sound of a taxi passing through the wet street.

Heat folded around him like a coat taken straight from a radiator. The air was thick with yeast and the dark sweetness of scorched flour. On the benches, rows of dough rose beneath their cloths, small, patient hills. A mixer turned with a steady animal grunt. When the oven opened, its orange mouth released a breath that blurred the far wall, and the tins on the rack answered with a brief metallic shiver. Beyond the door, night pressed against the glass. Inside, every surface seemed engaged in becoming warm.

The woman introduced herself as Mara and pointed towards an apron hanging on a hook. Finn tied it too tightly. She gave him a tray of rolls to arrange and showed him how much space to leave between them. His first row was straight; the second began to curve. Mara moved one roll with the back of her hand and told him to imagine how large they would become. He had been trying to fit them into the space they already occupied. For the next hour he watched things expand, settle and change colour.

At four, he made a mistake with the timer. Mara caught it before the loaf was ruined, but one side was darker than the other. Finn began explaining how the buttons had looked alike. She cut a slice from the end and handed it to him. They ate standing beside the open door, where the cooler air reached their faces. The bread was too hot to hold comfortably. It tasted ordinary and unexpectedly good. Mara said that the timer was badly labelled, then asked him to mark the correct button before the next batch.

By six, the first delivery van had arrived. Finn helped load the racks, counting twice because he no longer trusted his tired eyes. Outside, the taxi rank was filling and a cleaner was washing the pavement beneath the station clock. He took off the apron and found a pale line of flour across his shirt. On his bicycle, the cold morning air felt thinner than the night air he had entered. He passed the bakery's front window. The rolls were arranged behind it now, familiar shapes he could identify without stopping.

Read the second paragraph, from ‘Heat folded’ to ‘becoming warm’. How does the writer use language to present the warmth and activity of the bakery? Support your analysis with evidence from this paragraph. You may consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.